“The solution of every problem is another problem” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
About a year ago, Tsahi debated in his blog whether we need a Swiss army knife or a penknife as a communication protocol. What he was asking was whether we need different products for different tasks (penknives) or one solution to fit them all (Swiss army knife).
I returned to Tsahi’s post the other day, when I was thinking about the RADVISION solution. And I say “solution”, because this is how RADVISION sees and promotes its “solution” way of thinking, for the past few years.
This week, at InfoComm, RADVISION is not just unveiling version 7.0 of its video conferencing products; it releases Version 7.0 of its video conferencing solution, which in our view, serves the visual communication needs of everyone, and works the way you work.
What’s in a Video Conferencing Solution?
So what do you need in order to have the best video conferencing solution?
For starters, you need an MCU. This MCU should be able to cater to the needs of everyone in the organization, the who or where shouldn’t be important. High end, high def, legacy, desktop – any way a user wants to connect, he should be able to. We want to be able to give him the best experience possible, while not negatively affecting anyone else’s experience.
Then you need video conferencing clients. If you want to use endpoints, be my guest. But most users either don’t have endpoints or want to use video conferencing from the comfort of their desktops. Some of them are already using UC products, such as WebEx or OCS, so you want to be able to connect to them through their system.
Others want you to provide a client that has presence information, state of the art error resilience, the ability to connect from any location (be it home, office, airport) and of course, great connectivity.
Naturally, all of these have to connect to the MCU infrastructure and provide a great experience. It means that somewhere, there should be a management tool, that enables the system administrator to easily control the infrastructure, servers and endpoints. This management suite should make the infrastructure work as seamless as possible, providing valuable feedback (reports, UI) in real time, and solving scalability and distribution issues.,
And last but not least, there should be a way to view conferences, even if you don’t have a client at your disposal, or if you were occupied during the meeting. Streaming and archiving video conferences should be part of the solution.
Sounds like a great solution, isn’t it? Well, the only problem with this solution is … making it happen.
RADVISION’s Solution, Version 7.0
As we announced today, and as I already described partially in my InfoComm pre-show post, RADVISION presents its Video Conferencing Solution Version 7.0 today at InfoComm 09.
The RADVISION solution includes:
- SCOPIA Desktop V7.0, with H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC)
- SCOPIA Elite MCU, with high definition 1080p
- iVIEW V7.0 management and visual reporting tool
- High definition video solutions for Cisco WebEx, IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Office Communications Server.
All of these are great products, in it of themselves. I have written extensively on the importance of each of them, so that’s not of any consequence now..
We are not building penknives in RADVISION. We are looking for that Swiss army knife kind-of-feeling. Giving the customer an all inclusive solution that will enable him to solve any problem, a tool that works the way he wants in the way that he works.
A great example of this is the RADVISION “Virtual MCU” concept. – As I already explained in a previous post, our patented dynamic distributed architecture enables high-scale, distributed video conferencing deployment.. Having an over-all solution, that manages all parts of it, in synergy, means that the users should not be aware that there are different MCUs in different locations with different specifications. The user can use one access number for all conferences that will be created dynamically and seamlessly; the entire infrastructure will behave as one powerful MCU.
There are more examples and more use-cases, but the bottom line is that Version 7.0 is the Swiss army knife of video conferencing. Pick one up and start building your video conferencing experience in the way that you want it.
